I know, vigilance, I have to be vigilant, because no one knows that crime never sleeps, and suddenly bang! a shot, and there’s a policeman lying in a pool of blood, several hundred of us have fallen, four hundred and thirty-six dead, and there’s an end to gazing at the rising, beautiful red or yellow moon, and that is the mission I’m destined to pursue, watching and guarding the achievements of this young state of ours, this Party of ours. And so there are two conjoined centres in my brain, one that watches over and cherishes all that is beautiful in our society, and the other that enables me to enjoy the forest rides and clearings, the tracks that lead from one wood to the next across the fields that I love as if I were a farmer myself, because, even though on duty, I’ll get out of my Volga and have this sudden urge to head for the fields, where in the spring I pick up a handful of soil and sniff it, and when the grain crops are ripening I take a stroll past the endless fields on the pretext of running a check and there I stroke the ripening barley and wheat, sometimes plucking an ear and, like a farmer, rubbing the grains out into the palm of my hand, sniffing at them, smelling them and my nose, like an agronomist’s, tells me that this very week the grain has come ripe and it’s harvest time. Yet the most beautiful thing is still when you’re in the forest and the moon is high, that moon gives me such a thrill, the rising moon, the moon rising? But a figure emerged from the light of the inn to be drenched in the shower of light cast from a street lamp, and it gathered up its bike and mounted it and rode quickly off, riding into the outline of itself as the moon pushed at its back, and I could tell at once that it was Joe, a childhood friend, but nowadays a prodigious consumer of beer and black coffee and rum, sometimes he has a certain charm, one day he got so drunk at lunchtime that he rode his bike onto some private land, he was still a roadmender back then, and my cousin had fallen asleep after lunch, it being so hot, and suddenly, in a daze, she thought she’d caught a whiff of beer and rum and coffee and there was Joe the roadmender, leaning over her and whispering “I nearly kissed you, my beauty”, on another occasion, this time even before lunch, he careered onto some private land, into a half-dug trench where some weekend-cottage owners had been putting down a mains electricity cable, and he did a somersault and started shouting his mouth off: “Who gave you permission to dig the road up, this is going to cost you, digging up a public right of way, where’s your permit, I’m in charge of the roads round here!” And so, with no lights, Joe rode on, not even needing to peddle with the moon pushing at his back, and then towards New Leas the metalled road goes on and on downhill, not many people know that the road is a hundred and eighty-five metres above sea level and at New Leas it’s only a hundred and seventy-seven, so there’s a clear downward slope, the Kersko woods really forming a kind of shallow saucer, because the other side of New Leas the track rises again to the main road from Hradišťko to Semice, to an elevation of a hundred and eighty-five metres above sea level, but Joe, he kept swerving to the ditch on the other side of the road and right back again — how come he still has the appetite for it? How come he’s still quite with it? And I stepped out of the trees, but Joe was probably half-cut, he called out to me, that was ever his way, always, instead of a bell or a torch, calling out into the darkness: “Out of the way, folks, I’m going too fast to stop!” But I flashed my service torch twice and Joe hopped off his bike and says: “Good evening, me old pal!” And I says: “Where’s your light?” and pointing to the Moon he says: “Up there!” I says: “Where is your headlight as required by the Highway Code?” “In me bag,” said Joe and by the light of the moon he opened his bag and in it glinted a carpenter’s axe, and he took a nickel-plated torch out and switched it on, then put it back in his bag and says: “But I’m supposed to carry a light when there isn’t enough light from elsewhere, and the Moon’s shining, hell, a bright shining light, the Moon, damn’ beautiful light, don’t you think, Harry…” I says: “What’s your name, sir, show me your papers…,” and again he rifles about and offers his ID card to the light of my torch and I leafs through it and asks: “What is your name?” Joe looks at me, eyes full of reproach: “Don’t tell me you don’t recognise me, Harry!” I says: “What’s your name?” He says, cleverly: “But you’ve got it right there.” And that rattled me, because I could smell he reeked of beer and rum. I says: “Have you been drinking, sir?” And he bows to me and says: “I have, and I do and I will drink just as I’ve been drinking for as long as I can remember, d’you remember that time when a keg of beer fell off the back of a lorry at this ’ere bend and I ’id it under some branches and that night I shifted it into a cottage I ’ad the keys to? Then for a week the pair of us, we drank it together out of a litre glass and for a week we was pissed from daybreak on? And how my wife wanted to chuck me out, she said she was fed up of it an’ it ’ad to stop?” I handed him his ID back and says: “That was then, but now I’m on duty, right? And what’s the axe for?” Joe says: “You know I’m a carpenter, I do odd jobs, like.” And I says: “And do you have a license and pay tax?” Joe says: “Of course, I do, I pay my taxes…,” and he tottered and says: “Don’t you reckon that’s enough? Can I go now?” And I could tell he was going to fall into the ditch again, so I unscrewed one of his valves and tossed it over a hedge into an irrigation channel and the tyre let out a sigh and I decided: “Look here, Joe, you’re not as young as you used to be, you’d be better off on foot…” And Joe stood there speechless, I could see he wanted to say — and inside he was saying — ‘you filth, you bloody piece of filth, what a way to treat an old pal, you shitbag, what a way to treat a friend you’ve known since we were kids, what a way for one worker to treat another!’ But he said nothing, just set off, wheeling his bike with the vein on his forehead swelling with rage. And I stood there and watched him go, the Moon lifting so as to push him along by the shoulders. Joe’s shadow had shrunk, like when you look down on a cello or double base from above, and I wondered, had I done right by tossing his valve, or not? In the end, I decided I had been right to let his tyre down because, like a father, it was down to me to prevent an accident, so I wasn’t even surprised when I heard Joe calling back to me from the spring: “You should be ashamed o’ yourself, treatin’ a fellow worker like that!” And then I ran after him, took him by the shoulder and said: “And because you were riding without lights, I’m going to fine you fifty crowns, and let that be an end of it, all right?” And he looked at me, and I could just see him in the same situation as that time, long ago, when I was a warrant officer and riding along on my bike, and as I reached the point where there was a culvert under the road, I thought I heard someone shouting: ‘Help! Help!’, dully, like from inside a house… so I leapt off my bike and kept running into the woods and then the voice came again as if from the road, so I ran across to the far side of the road and beyond, and then it sounded as if it was on the road, so I kept running hither and thither and reducing the actual distance to the road, and all the time there was this terrible shouting: ‘Help! Help! good folks, help…,’ by which time I could tell the shouting was coming from the very middle of the road, so I went towards the culvert and there in among the wild raspberries and brambles lay a bicycle, and a pair of legs were poking out of the culvert, and I grabbed the legs and pulled and out came Joe, the roadmender, rumbling drunk. He sat up and rubbed his eyes: “I thought it were night-time! Thanks, pal, you saved my life, I owe you fifty pints an’ an invite next time I kill a pig…” — this time I shone my torch and knew that as he handed me the fifty crowns he was thinking of the same thing as me, how for fifty pints I’d saved his life beneath the culvert, but I wanted to take him down a peg, teach him a lesson, that he had to have lights, because rules is rules… And then he took himself off with his bike, meek and barely able to walk, it wasn’t just his tyre I’d let down, but his soul, too, and that’s how it should be, when I’m on duty I don’t know even my own brother, I once fined my son for parking in the wrong place, and though he hasn’t spoken to me since, I’m quite happy talking to myself and the Moon, the Moon hanging up there in the sky, I talk to the pine trees when they let out their smell, these are my friends, and I can tell that ditches and streams and ponds are my friends, I don’t care for others any more, I don’t want to know them. I’m a loner. So I sat down, the Moon sat on my lap like some girl or other, I held out my arms and the moonlight licked my hands like a kitten, or a police dog. By now the lights in the inn were all out, some cyclists rode past me saying things that I didn’t like very much, some folk, when they’re on their bikes, they’re so loud, it’s not exactly anti-state jibes, nothing conspiratorial, but they can say such treasonous things that if I were the least bit inclined, I could have them up in court and into jail, but from their general tone and tenor I took it to be the beer talking, and when all’s said and done, things come to my hearing like to a confessor, I hear what people are thinking, I hear them having a rant, and when I’m talking to myself, I also have the odd rant, but never out loud… So I got up and strode moonwards back to the inn, the restaurant in the woods, inside they were all asleep, I took a chair, one of the red folding chairs, stood it by the edge of the road and thought awhile about myself, then with some effort dispelled the image of my wife, who had left me, and of my son, who had left me, and saw myself sitting there, abandoned, on a folding garden seat, powerful, but alone, and if I didn’t have the Moon, and if I wasn’t so fond of drainage ditches and didn’t love pine trees and ripening fields and the sweet-smelling furrows of arable land, I’d actually have no grounds at all for feeling happy, more the reverse, but whenever I started getting a bit morbid, I’d place a hand on the medals I’d been given, the decorations, and that gave me strength, and I would tell myself that people who’ve received the highest honours, they’re not all happy either, their wives and sons might have left them too, but when they look at their medals, they attain that happiness, that recognition that equates to happiness, so I began to smile and I was proud of myself and at peace with myself. And then a car came out of the trees down below, I could tell it was a white Trabant and could see it belonged to none other than Mr Kimla from the chemist’s, so I switched my torch on and waved it up and down, and when the car slowed, I shone the torch on my medals so the driver could see it was the commandant himself waiting here for him, and he drove right up to me and stopped. He wound down the window and asked disconsolately: “Should I get out or not?” I said: “You can stay where you are, Mr Kimla, but how many glasses of wine have you had?” Mr Kimla brightened: “Two, two small ones.” And I said: “Not more?” He replied anxiously: “Not more…” I paused, letting him suffer, I was tormenting him, all was quiet and the night came streaming through the leaves of the oak trees and moon-white blotches like coconut milk formed on the ground. I said: “And what kind of wine was it, white or red?” And the chemist agonised: “Red, and I had a lot to eat and I was also drinking mineral water.” He had spoken and I could see that he’d had rather more to drink, but I could see what a beautiful night it was and how beautiful the Moon was and so, as with Joe, I was indulgent, magnanimous. I crossed one booted leg in front of the other and said: “We might suppose that’s not very much, mightn’t we?” And the chemist rejoiced: “Very little…” And I pulled myself up to my full height and said: “But it’s enough to lose your license for. However! I’m in a good mood and so a fine of five hundred crowns will put matters right. And get out of the car!” And I could see that he couldn’t get up out of the seat, not that he’d been drinking, just mortified at the image of a five hundred-crown fine, mortified to the extent that his rheumatism got him and he started staggering and I was wallowing in it — I couldn’t stand people who broke down in the face of a fine… And I says: “Lock the car, and have you got the money on you?” He picked up his bag and said: “No, I’ve only got a hundred…,” which he offered to me, but I says: “And at home, have you got any money in the house?” He said: “Yes…” And I says: “My Volga’s parked there in the ride behind those oaks, so we can pop along and get that fine…,” and I strode off ahead, and the fact that the chemist followed me wearing only slippers rallied my spirits and my class awareness, and so we got in my car and the chemist squirmed and whimpered, he didn’t have much money and would three hundred do, and I let him hope by saying wait till we got to his place… and so we reached his place,